“The 39 Steps” began as a novel written almost 100 years ago by John Buchan. Alfred Hitchcock made it into a film in 1935 – one of his earliest, and one of his best – and eight years ago it became a wild-and-crazy stage play.

Vermont Stage on Tuesday night turned the comic spy story into something else again: a trisected production meant to give the audience insight into how directors assemble the pieces that become a whole play.

The experiment is the Burlington company’s second-annual production known as “The Bake Off,” following last spring’s three-ring-circus version of Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice.” Artistic director Cristina Alicea asked three directors — Sarah Carleton, Dylan Friedman and Cathy Hurst — to break “The 39 Steps” into three parts (13 steps each, if you like) with three separate casts, all putting their own mark on what is both one cohesive production and three smaller productions-within-a-production.

The play centers on Richard Hannay, a British man who gets caught up in a mysterious international spy ring. Naturally, he runs into a series of femme fatales, played in the Vermont Stage edition by a trio of women – Alice Corvo as the European spy who sets everything in motion, Sylvia Sword as a Scottish wife who helps Hannay after he runs into trouble and Kit Rivers as the woman who appears to be Hannay’s mortal enemy, which means, of course, that she also stands a good chance of being his love interest.

One of the most interesting elements of “The Bake Off” is watching a threesome of actors interpret the main role. Hannay’s personality was different in the hands of Jason Lorber (cavalier), Patrick Clow (ironic) and Justin Rowe (charming rascal). Some of that variation comes as the character evolves throughout Patrick Barlow’s script, but is also affected by the skills the actors bring to the table and the attributes each director brings out of his or her performer.

Alicea talked in a question-and-answer session following Tuesday’s production about how this version of “The Bake Off” emphasized how each director would overcome the obstacles of staging a complex play within the small budget of a regional professional theater company. “I definitely think it’s about expressing a different voice,” she said.

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The three directors fielded questions from audience members and talked about how they made do with what they had to work with. “It’s kind of homemade props,” Carleton said. That’s definitely a hallmark of the Vermont Stage take on “The 39 Steps” — two actors wielding sheets of paper stand in for malfunctioning window blinds; a cheap wooden frame becomes a rough-hewn and very portable window; confetti fills in quite nicely for blood.

Hurst said the directors might have actors skilled in comedy or dance in their scene, so they adapted their own vision based on the talent in front of them. “You take the best idea in the room,” she said.

The problem with “The Bake Off,” as was the case last year, is that it only gives partial insight into how directors assemble their productions; a night featuring a short one-act play presented three times with different interpretations would be a much more effective way to show the variations in directors’ visions. But that would also be redundant; the strength of “The 39 Steps” is that it’s a funny, fast-paced show no matter how many directors, actors and interpretations factor into it.